(01-13-2020, 07:44 AM)inthemoode Wrote: it's dealing with and displaying the exact same data
Not entirely no, much of the overhead of using a web application with client-side rendering is that the browser caches the metadata and runs javascript to regenerate the data into html on the fly so it can be displayed by the browser. The advantage of this in this case (where the web server is running on a low-power system) is the html rendering is not constrained by the Pi's performance, rendering is offloaded to the client browser which is more flexible and will ususally be faster than the server (the Pi) in terms of hardware.
An Android application like mpdroid or M.A.L.P will cache the mpd database to the Android device's filesystem and query and render the data offline without the overhead of generating html in a web browser, also UI rendering is usually hardware accelerated.
The disadvantage of an application is that a different version of an app has to be created for every operating system and platform one might want to support whereas every platform can run a web browser, thus a web interface is a more open and accessible interface and less development work.
If it helps have a look a my recent post which might help you understand some the overhead in relation to the size of the library, you may want to try the tweak too if you're seeing major slowdowns on the tag view on slow hardware.
I'll stop replying now as these comments aren't related to the thread.
